There are many other things that could be done within individual communities and neighborhoods to help URMs that would be more effective and produce quicker results.

Examples please.

Also, on what basis do you claim that they would be more effective/quicker?

Thanks.

Vouchers. And well-funded voucher programs.

Good funding isn't necessary or sufficient for good primary or secondary school educational programs. The presence of a faculty knowledgeable of the subject matter they are teaching, and an incentive for the faculty to do well, are more crucial.

Dunbar High school, in Washington DC, illustrates this point. The education offered by Dunbar allowed the children of black laborers and maids to attend Ivy League colleges, obtain doctorate-level degrees, and enter the professions, military, and Congress. Dunbar was able to accomplish this despite having a student body consisting entirely of poor Blacks in the pre-civil-rights era and having a dilapidated physical facility, primarily because its teachers and administrators were competent and incredibly driven to improve the lot of their students.

Private schools are more likely to, and generally do, feature more competent and driven teachers and administrators than public schools, since they must compete against other schools for students, as, unlike public schools, they do not have monopoly rights over the students living in a school district's geographic area.

Vouchers will allow low-income children to attend private schools. Additionally, since voucher programs require parents to shop amongst the options available in the education services market, parents utilizing vouchers will become more involved in their childrens' education, as they necessarily need to be involved from the first stages of the program. This parental involvement may improve the child's educational experience.

Since many low-income families are "URMs," this proposal would disproportionately benefit the current "URM" group. This proposal wouldn't be a quick fix, but it would yield better long-term results than the current state of affairs.

I couldn't find an article containing the original 1995 Steele/Aronson study, nor an article containing the 2002 one cited by the OP, but I did find a refutations to the 1995 study's conclusions, which I've posted below, from a law professor at UPenn that brings up some alleged weaknesses of the study. If anyone has a link to the study, please provide it, because I'd like to take a look at it sometime.

Teaching young men (ALL young men-but especially URMs who are more effected by this problem) to be more responsible, would be another. Children with absent fathers are more likely to be involved in gang and criminal activity and perform poorly in school.

Changing the belief within in communities that education isn't important. I bet that would be a helpful one aswell. Someone should try it.

From today's WSJ, "Affirmative Action Backfires": by Gail Heriot, professor of law at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Three years ago, UCLA law professor Richard Sander published an explosive, fact-based study of the consequences of affirmative action in American law schools in the Stanford Law Review.

Easily the most startling conclusion of his research: Mr. Sander calculated that there are fewer black attorneys today than there would have been if law schools had practiced color-blind admissions -- about 7.9% fewer by his reckoning. He identified the culprit as the practice of admitting minority students to schools for which they are inadequately prepared. In essence, they have been "matched" to the wrong school.

Mr. Sander's original article noted that when elite law schools lower their academic standards in order to admit a more racially diverse class, schools one or two tiers down feel they must do the same. As a result, there is now a serious gap in academic credentials between minority and non-minority law students across the pecking order, with the average black student's academic index more than two standard deviations below that of his average white classmate.

Not surprisingly, such a gap leads to problems. Students who attend schools where their academic credentials are substantially below those of their fellow students tend to perform poorly.

As a result, in elite law schools, 51.6% of black students had first-year grade point averages in the bottom 10% of their class as opposed to only 5.6% of white students. Nearly identical performance gaps existed at law schools at all levels. This much is uncontroversial.

Mr. Sander calculated that if law schools were to use color-blind admissions policies, fewer black law students would be admitted to law schools (3,182 students instead of 3,706), but since those who were admitted would be attending schools where they have a substantial likelihood of doing well, fewer would fail or drop out (403 vs. 670). In the end, more would pass the bar on their first try (1,859 vs. 1,567) and more would eventually pass the bar (2,150 vs. 1,981) than under the current system of race preferences. Obviously, these figures are just approximations, but they are troubling nonetheless.

Under current practices, only 45% of blacks who enter law school pass the bar on their first attempt as opposed to over 78% of whites. Even after multiple tries, only 57% of blacks succeed. The other 43% are often saddled with student debt, routinely running as high as $160,000, not counting undergraduate debt. How great an increase in the number of black attorneys is needed to justify these costs?

MP: One problem is that despite all of the potential problems from a "mismatch" between a law school's academic standard and the academic abilities of minority students, law schools are under extreme pressure to enroll minorities to maintain accreditation and student-loan eligibility.

Some admissions officer may be frantic to enroll minority students in order to comply with the stringent new diversity standards of the American Bar Association Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. As the federal government's accrediting agency for law schools, the ABA Council determines whether a law school will be eligible for the federal student-loan program. The law school that fails to satisfy its diversity requirements does so at its peril -- as a number of law school deans can amply attest.

Decades of law students have relied upon the good faith of law school officials to tell them what they needed to know. For the 43% of black law students who never became lawyers, maybe that reliance was misplaced.

MP: Although the article above focuses on the "academic mismatch" problem at law school, the same analysis applies to university programs in general. The chart above (click to enlarge) shows data at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor for undergraduate students, except for the last column on graduation rates, which is national data. The UM data (pre-Proposal 2) are from the Center for Equal Opportunity and clearly illustrate the mismatch problem:

A black student with a 3.2 high school GPA and 1210 SAT score has a 92% of admission to UM vs. only a 14% for a white student. However, 1) black students (45%) are almost 6 times as likely as white students (8%) to be on academic probation at UM, and 2) and almost 2/3 of black students (64%) fail to graduate nationally in 6 years, vs. 42% for white students.

The "response" is fascinating. It acknowledges that that over 42% of blacks entering law school fail to ever become lawyers (largely due to academic struggles), and does not deny that blacks generally are admitted to schools where their numbers are disproportionately low, yet insists that the two factors are somehow unconnected.

I guess this is what happens when your conclusions are determined before you write your paper.

Sure, when your premises are based on pure assumptions.

I mean, whites have a much higher bar passage rate, most likely due to their uncanny ability to suck a professor off to ecstasy.

I guess this is what happens when your conclusions are determined before you write your paper post your response.